Extraordinary clip from 20 years ago. David Bowie sharing what he feels about what the internet is going to turn into. And he’s not wrong.
— Omid Djalili (@omid9) October 25, 2019
Paxman: it’s just a tool tho isn’t it?
Bowie: No it’s not.
pic.twitter.com/zypoJEVJCN
October 26, 2019
David Bowie — speaking 20 years ago — says the internet "is an alien life form."
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Language is a virus from Outer Space.
- William S. Burroughs
H/T
- Laurie Anderson
Well this brings back memories. I guess I first touched the intenet in '94 using a service called Prodigy. Web rings! Geocities! Harley Hahn's Internet and Web Yellow Pages (printed on paper--thing's were that primitive).
Whereas humans are carbon-based lifeforms, the Internet is a silicon-based entity.
By gum! Bowie certainly was the omniscient seer of technology, wasn't he? Thousands of IT engineers and computer scientists were utterly clueless of the way forward until England's rock 'n roll visionary told them to think of an unseen, totally submerged iceberg.
Agree. The internet, social media, and so on are a great experiment. The early returns are not encouraging.
Listened to Andrew Yang on the JRE podcast yesterday. We’re headed in the next ten years to a combination of the 30’s and the 60’s with millions of lower and middle class workers facing permanent unemployability. A $1grand monthly UBI is not going to replace that $30k to $80k a year job. A hard rain is a-gonna fall.
And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the Internet that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external links.
What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows.
He's not wrong.
Althouse apparently doesn't have a tag for trivialities spoken by past-their-prime celebrities.
I think she needs one given the ever-growing list:
Robert De Niro
Joy Behar
Alec Baldwin
Steven Colbert (that's "col-bear" like everybody in SC pronounces it)
Bette Midler
Kathy Griffin
Whoopi Goldberg
Joe Scarbrough
Mitt Romney
Michael Avenatti
etc.
Sometimes I think that what we call genius is really just the confidence to trust what the mind tells you. But he sure looks like a genius in this clip. Maybe because he made his living providing content through various mediums and was an intelligent man, he thought deeply about what it meant to his business personally.
They’re gonna be all kinds of extremes! Weird wild stuff.
Bowie does look super frickin cool there though.
Bowie tinkered: with different styles, media, everything, really. He was a visionary, and Camille Paglia’s high praise for his cultural literacy and highly developed aesthetic sense are deserved. It’s a credit to the stodgy seeming Brits that they embraced him as broadly as they did, and that he became a universally beloved cultural icon there (even as he embraced America). The notion that what he says here is trivial or would have been obvious to IT or network engineers is ridiculous. He was perspicacious and his multimedia pop art career gave him special insight as skylark suggests into how the internet would change consumer/producer or “maker” dynamic.
No matter how often I hear it, Bowie’s deep and incredibly masculine speaking voice and style always throw me.
Bowie was "cursing at the Astro-net" in the early 1970's.
I always thought Bowie was an alien life form.
"who is like the Beast, and who can fight against it?"
So David Bowie a.k.a. Eric Lampton really was / is The Man Who Fell to Earth. Is the Internet the true VALIS, the Vast Active Living Intelligence System...? Or is it on the contrary a perversion of it, an emanation of the black iron prison?
Completely coincidentally, I was watching “explained” on Netflix a little while ago, the topic was software, and they showed the same Bowie clip.
"...it’s just a tool tho isn’t it?
Bowie: No it’s not."
Actually it is, and so are you.
BBC interviewer worries that people on the internet are expressing different and unique opinions--not simply repeating coordinated messaging from the BBC or from Leftist control groups in the 60s and 70s.
So the BBC never changed, did they?
Speaking as someone who programmed on the "bare iron" back in the '70s and '80s, any talk that attributes malevolence, much less intelligence, to computer technology will be dismissed brusquely and with prejudice.
Those of us who grew up without runtime libraries and compilers view such romanticism with a jaundiced eye.
You're face to face with the man who sold the world. A long, long time ago.
You're face to face with the man who sold the world. A long, long time ago.
“We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.”
Bowie was covering all bases with that prediction. Here’s one that I, for one, am very thankful never came to pass:
https://static.pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/hillary_clinton_birthday_10-26-19-800x747.png
It all seems tame and expected to me, expected as of the late 80s. It's just dumb computers programmed to do this or that task.
Always when you tackled a hard problem for doing something with a computer, you start by aiming for something intelligent that will handle possible events smartly, and you always wound up with a stupid algorithm that had no intelligence at all but was good enough for the task. All that imagining was really just getting a handle on what sort of stupid thing could do the task as well as intelligence.
You see such imagining today but not coupled with the ability to program to kill it off.
After 9/11 Bowie gave a concert in each of the five boroughs including Staten Island, raising funds for first responders. And the Queens show I got to to observe him and his wife backstage. Solid people.
Impressive if Bowie actually said it in 1999 or earlier. Less so if he said it in 2002 or 2004 when Web 2.0 and Social Media really took off. Has anyone fact-checked the "20 years ago" claim?
I blogged this, years ago right after he died: "David Bowie sent us messages from the future."
I think he was a great composer, I bet that in “rock and roll heaven” he and Cole Porter talk together a lot.
For the grumpy old punch card programmers: it's not the computers doing stuff on the internet, or the AI algorithms being deployed against the mountainous data created daily, no matter how eerie that stuff can be (even if they are just a bunch of dumb algorithms, although deep learning is getting better at faking intelligence). It's what the people are doing on the internet, created initially as basically an email platform, that represents the artificial intelligence or life form that Bowie is referencing.
Daskol, speaking as a grumpy old punch card programmer and as a teletype programmer of remote computers, I agree.
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